Tag: Books and literature

Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

readers finally glimpse the exceptional man who turned poetry into a panoramic mirror for all of humanity — Bryce Christensen Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who “knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did” (John Leonard, Harper’s), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how… Read More Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

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The Price of Monotheism

Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion NB: This is one of the most thought-provoking studies in the history and philosophy of religion that – in my limited reading – I have come across. The author Jan Assman (1938-2024) was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion… Read More The Price of Monotheism

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Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Chronicle of a Relationship 1882

Robert S. Leventhal Lou Salomé was undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and articulate women of her era. Her own writing, especially her essays on sexuality and erotism, have value not merely in their historical reflection of the era in which they were written, but in their own right as documents of radical femininity in the… Read More Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Chronicle of a Relationship 1882

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‘Here lives the monster’s brain’: the man who exposed Switzerland’s dirty secrets

Inspired by Che Guevara, Jean Ziegler has spent the past 60 years exposing how Switzerland enabled global wrongdoing. His enemies accuse him of treason Ziegler would use the term “secondary imperialism” to define his country’s modus operandi. This was not the first-order French, British or, later, American imperialism… It was a more discreet kind of… Read More ‘Here lives the monster’s brain’: the man who exposed Switzerland’s dirty secrets

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The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is a classic critique of capitalism – but it wasn’t an overnight success

Gareth Dale Hungarian social theorist Karl Polanyi is best known for his exploration of the collapse of liberal institutions that occurred between 1914 and 1945. His book, The Great Transformation, traces the catastrophes of those decades to the globalisation of market liberalism. In his view, the attempt by liberal social engineers to establish a “self-regulated” market… Read More The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is a classic critique of capitalism – but it wasn’t an overnight success

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Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981)

By Jairus Banaji Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981), left Germany for the US when he was 22. Mattick saw the revolutions in Russia and China as ‘not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the “association of free and equal producers”, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism’. ‘Marxism served here… Read More Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981)

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